Youth Tech Net

Youth Tech Net believes the success of the first Global Dialogue on AI Governance would: Be a platform for multilateral and diverse multi-stakeholder consensus building, that includes the representatives of young people, children and future generations, and young people themselves. Produce a consensus on best practices for AI governance that addresses the asymmetrical risks of AI on the rights of young people, children and future generations, in accordance with the UN Declaration on the Rights of the Child. Produce consensus material that is viable for use by member states to inform policymaking and fulfil obligations under the UN Declaration on the Rights of the Child and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. In concordance with the three pillars of the United Nations: sustainable development, peace and security, and human rights, Youth Tech Net believes the success of the Global Dialogue on AI Governance would produce consensus building across these themes. Particularly, the Dialogue should address the impact of technology on youth and future generations, and produce recommendations for multilateral cooperation and intergovernmental processes to address this issue. Bearing in mind the asymmetrical effects of poor global cooperation on AI governance on youth and future generations, the success of the Global dialogue should produce a set of principles or guidelines for global cooperation on AI governance that addresses the protection of children in accordance with the UN Declaration on the Rights of the Child and the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

• Social, economic, ethical, cultural, linguistic and technical implications of AI
• Protection and promotion of human rights
• Open-source software, open data and open AI models

As an organisation of young people, Youth Tech Net's priority is to ensure all young people are seen as agents of change and are taken into consideration in policymaking that affects us and future generations. We recognise that the protection and promotion of all human rights is fundamental to this goal. As youth, our lived experience gives us the conviction that AI governance is a matter of our fundamental rights and is already having a disproportionate effect on young peoples futures. We also recognise that young people and future generations, among other groups, bear an asymmetrical level of harm to our rights and futures from the risks of AI. Open-source software, open data and open AI models are foundational to a just AI future for youth globally. Proprietary AI systems centre power in the hands of a small number of well-resourced actors, predominantly in the Global North. Young people, who will be disproportionately shaped by AI systems they did not design and cannot interrogate, deserve access to transparent, auditable models and the data that trains them. Open approaches reduce dependency, enable local adaptation, and allow youth-led civil society organisations like ours to meaningfully participate in AI development rather than merely consume its outputs. Critically, openness is also a prerequisite for accountability: without visibility into how models are built, trained, and deployed, meaningful human oversight is impossible. Youth Tech Net urges the Dialogue to treat openness not as a technical detail but as a governance principle: one that determines who holds power over AI, and whether future generations inherit tools that serve them or systems built without them.

Youth Tech Net believes global AI governance is central to the issue of climate change. The issue of climate change bears a disproportionate impact on the youth, particularly in Pacific and Global South nations. Appropriate AI governance can assist in supporting potential climate solutions. However, uncertain AI governance can exacerbate climate change risks and leave vulnerable nations behind in terms of climate resilience and adaptation. This is cross cutting because it links environmental sustainability with digital governance, which is often less prioritised. The impacts of climate change are intergenerational and unequally distributed. Young people will bear the long-term consequences of decisions made today, despite having limited influence in governance processes. This highlights disparities in access, capacity, and decision-making power between the Global North and South, where unequal access to data, infrastructure, and technical expertise risks widening existing climate adaptation gaps.

Youth and children feel the social, economic, ethical, cultural, linguistic effects of AI more keenly than other groups, and in different ways. Young people today and the generations that proceed will likewise live to see the long term effects of our AI governance choices today. These effects are cross-cutting and complex, and permeate every aspect of society. In particular, Youth Tech Net draws attention to the adverse effects of AI on young people's and children' s psychology and healthy development, education, and social wellbeing. As young people, our lived experiences reflect the adverse and complex impacts of AI on our lives, relationships, and futures, particularly on our aspects for employment. We also draw attention to the complex relationship between AI and the environment, and urge governance processes to address the asymmetrical impacts of global climate change on young people and future generations. Inherent to these issues are the detrimental effects of the concentration of global political and economic power in the hands of corporations, who are the primary developers of AI. Therefore we urge the dialogue to address regulation of companies as well as products and consider the effect of profit-seeking, extractive, and exploitative technology on youth globally.

Youth Tech Net believes The Global Dialogue on AI Governance offers an opportunity to strengthen international cooperation by ensuring that children and young people, who are among those most profoundly affected by AI systems, are included and considered in global governance frameworks. A strong foundation already exists. The January 2026 Joint Statement on Artificial Intelligence and the Rights of the Child establishes the first global position on how AI should respect and advance children's rights. The Dialogue is well placed to build on this momentum by encouraging Member States to integrate the Statement's eleven priority areas into their national AI strategies, and by working with existing bodies, including UNICEF, the ITU, and the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, to support implementation, particularly in countries that lack regulatory capacity. Tasking the Independent International Scientific Panel with producing dedicated evidence on AI's impacts on children's development would further strengthen this cooperative foundation. The Convention on the Rights of the Child, ratified by almost every country in the world, provides a powerful and widely shared normative basis for this approach.

Youth Tech Net urges the Dialogue to connect AI governance with existing children's rights initiatives and initiatives that address cross-cutting intergenerational issues. Specifically, UNESCO's Recommendation on the Ethics of AI, the OECD AI Principles, and the Joint Statement on Artificial Intelligence and the Rights of the Child. UNESCO has a deep focus on areas such as data governance, environmental impacts, and the importance of education, while the OECD AI Principles offer the first intergovernmental standard on AI governance. The Joint Statement on Artificial Intelligence and the Rights of the Child specifically addresses children's rights. The Dialogue offers a unique opportunity for children's rights to be brought into deeper consideration by existing AI and climate governance initiatives. The Dialogue should build on each of these areas, specifically looking at the data governance and education surrounding AI in developing countries. Most importantly, the Dialogue offers an opportunity for inclusion of marginalised voices in the above governance initiatives. Specifically, Youth Tech Net believes this is a crucial opportunity to invite children's rights, digital rights, and minority youth advocacy groups, organisations, and other actors, to participate in governance efforts concerning AI governance.

Youth Tech Net believes the Dialogue must aim to capture the perspectives of a vast and differing array of young people across the globe. To accurately mitigate the risks of AI, understand the full range of harms, and work toward guidance and meaningful solutions, it is crucial to ensure a diverse array of young stakeholders are represented. The dialogue should reach out to a variety of youth groups across different countries and socioeconomic backgrounds, if feasible. To ensure representation, the dialogue should reach out to advocacy organisations, academics, or governments that can best represent the youth group, as well as providing mechanisms for direct self representation. Technical experts, for example, the International Organisation for Standardisation, will be particularly beneficial. Many young people, just starting their lives, have concerns about the uncertainty of their future, but no effective way to clarify it. These experts, who have a different level of technical understanding of the fields young people are entering, should work with youth advocates. In a similar vein to the youth advocacy groups, the dialogue should include professionals and academics from a variety of countries, making it more likely that there will be an expert there who recognises and understands a raised concern. In this regard, experts should primarily collaborate with youth advocates to understand and address future concerns. With a clearer understanding of young people's opinions and concerns, a global solution can be reached to maximise impact across youth stakeholders. Firms and governments should also be represented to understand the feasibility of any solution.

Global discussions like the Dialogue are intended to operate as inclusive and multistakeholder platforms to deliver fresh input. However, the implementation and practice of these principles remain uneven as underrepresented voices continue to be at the margins of such processes. Currently, AI governance policy is disproportionately shaped by dominant technology firms, governments, and technology experts from higher income countries. However, individuals who are the most affected by these AI systems include intersectional youth, particularly youth in Indigenous communities, youth with disabilities, young women and girls, gender diverse, LGBTQIA+ youth, minority language speakers and large communities across developing economies. These young people, who are often directly subjected to AI-driven decision-making processes in areas such as policing, education, and employment have been excluded from voicing their thoughts and opinions on AI's governance. This underrepresentation directly undermines the legitimacy and effectiveness of the current standard of AI governance. The absence of these perspectives will risk reinforcing top-down decision making approaches, which may in turn fail to capture lived experiences and context specific issues highlighted by underrepresented voices. Youth Tech Net believes intersectional youth voices which have traditionally been excluded from AI governance discussions can be included in a number of ways. Particularly, we urge the Dialogue to directly include civil society minority and youth advocacy groups, and youth representatives. Practically, this also means provision of different formats for participation for diverse youth. Relying solely on written materials in consultation, for example, will exclude many youth voices. The Dialogue must consider the diverse ways that youth show up to participate.

Affected stakeholders must be provided with accessible and appropriately funded pathways to participate in AI governance processes. This is particularly true of youth participation. Traditional intergovernmental formats, such as prepared statements, panel discussions and formal plenary sessions tend to favour well resourced delegations, and by doing so reproduce existing power dynamics. Regional consultations, conducted in all UN languages and in accessible formats, would ensure that the annual Geneva session reflects genuinely global input rather than only the views of those able to travel and participate in person. Additionally, digital participation tools, designed to be accessible across different connectivity levels, could significantly broaden geographic reach. These digital participation tools would be especially meaningful for regional, Indigenous, economically disadvantaged, and disabled youth, especially considering youth have different ways of interacting with technology compared to adults. For example, the Dialogue might look to non-proprietary initiatives like Pol.is, an opensource survey platform designed to enhance collaboration and consensus-making. Developing specific platforms for digital participation beyond simple surveys or written feedback, like interactive chat rooms and AI tools used to represent natural language data may be especially useful in engaging underrepresented youth. However, the Dialogue must ensure digital participation is refined to recognise the collective rights of local knowledge systems, and having a structured framework will ensure Indigenous and CALD individuals secure and retain their collective sovereignty over their knowledge, and be appropriately credited for supplying culturally specific data to the Dialogue.

The European Union's AI Act represents the most comprehensive binding regulatory framework yet adopted for the governance of AI, introducing a risk-based approach that seeks to address the potential harms of different AI applications. Its explicit protections for children and prohibition on certain uses of AI in sensitive contexts offer concrete legislative models for other jurisdictions. However the risk-based approach is not without its flaws. Good AI governance efforts recognise that the impacts of AI, especially frontier AI, are sociotechnical, and cannot simply be subsumed into existing risk governance frameworks. This assumption is especially important if governance is to meaningfully address intersectional and diverse youth groups who have traditionally been excluded from normative definitions of risk. Furthermore, the unregulated use of frontier AI is proving to have profound effects on social fabric, democracy, and human rights. This points to the need for more sociotechnical, interdisciplinary approaches to AI governance. Practical guidance on AI at an operational level is now focusing on impact, as opposed to risk. For example, provisions for impact assessment and stakeholder engagement have been emphasised in ISO/IEC 42001, and many jurisdictions, including in Australia, are adopting the basic principles of impact assessment. Youth Tech Net believes a holistic approach to addressing the impacts of AI is crucial to AI governance that is meaningfully inclusive and effective.